Badger Bars Tavern Tales

Relive the days when wisconsin was young and wild, when the tavern was the social hub of small towns across the state.

Enjoy a cold brew with good friends at one of Wisconsin's best bars. This guide features 101 different watering holes, so you're sure to find the best places to stop and taste the suds. This is the ultimate guide to Wisconsin's most unique and memorable taverns.

In these humorous and heartfelt essays, Patti See celebrates small-town life in Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley. Featuring childhood memories of supper clubs, thrift sales, and cribbage games, as well as the midlife concerns that accompany having a son in the military, a parent with Alzheimer’s, and a private onsite septic system, See’s writing praises the quirky charm of her hometown and its people. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s as the youngest of eight children, Patti never imagined she’d stay in Chippewa Falls as an adult. Now, living on rural Lake Hallie just five miles from her childhood home, she has a new appreciation for all that comes with country living, from ice fishing and eagle sightings to pontoon rides and tavern dice. These brief essays—many of which were originally published in the Sawdust Stories column of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram—establish that, above all else, it’s friends, family, and other folks in our hometown who provide us with a sense of belonging.

Watertown is a perfect place to raise children, where criminal mischief and scandal are the rare exception to the rule. Discover over a century and a half's worth of exceptions. Travel back to the origins of Watertown, when the house next door might be a brothel and the man on the street might be a serial killer. Hear the tale of poor ninety-five-year-old Mary Kodesch, whose son left her to freeze to death in the barn, and that of the two young boys whose 1890 campaign of arson targeted everything from a church to a box factory. Then press on into the violent history of the Cleveland Street poltergeist house as Jannke delivers a thrilling combination of thoroughly researched fact and inexplicable mystery that will leave the hardiest Watertown residents torn between eagerly turning the next page and nervously looking over their shoulders.

Silas Cully's Tavern Tales is a sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant look at Nineteenth Century America through the eyes of a barkeep. Who else but the local barkeep could tell it all? Here is Silas - expounding against California statehood, chiding ladies for entering his barroom, and telling the jokes and humorous stories that are his stock in trade. Authentic food and drink recipes from 1850 taverns are also provided.